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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28752780">north star, i need you to guide me home</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/elektra/pseuds/elektra'>elektra</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>balance of power [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Bleach</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Post-Canon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-05-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 04:00:38</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,491</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28752780</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/elektra/pseuds/elektra</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Years after the end of the war, Ulquiorra contemplates what it would mean to recreate the Hueco Mundo that once was, but in turn is challenged to reconcile his own perceptions with reality.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Ulquiorra Cifer/Szayel Aporro Granz</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>balance of power [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/577738</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">For the last fifteen years, Ulquiorra has thought that sometimes, on the right night, the winds of Hueco Mundo sound like Szayel’s voice.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">It doesn’t say anything. That would be true delusion. But for just a moment, it sounds like his pitch and timbre and Ulquiorra must stop himself from turning his head to listen more closely. Instead he turns further into the battered marble of Las Noches’s throne, shielding himself from the draft that filters dust down into the hall.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Everything has only broken more, after so many years. Such is the inescapable way of the universe. Someday Ulquiorra may find himself buried beneath the rubble if the columns and pillars continue to erode, or the sand piling in the corners of every room will finally come up over his head.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">After the wind subsides some, he rubs the clumps of sand and salt out of his eyelashes and creaks out of his seat. When there are voices dancing in the air, he should find something to do besides wilting alone in the desecrated throne room.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">In two quick strides, Ulquiorra steps from the top of the throne to the edge of the hole in the ceiling above it, planting his foot on the crumbling concrete and pulling himself up to the surface by the exposed rebar.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Las Noches, what had been.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">For half a mile around, sticky black stone that glitters green with Murciélago’s toxic reiatsu spreads out from where he had pierced the dome, when it had still been standing, just above the throne hall. The sinister moon and its starlings.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Hueco Mundo itself leans towards bedlam. The wind, the shifting dunes, the cold have become extremes — or perhaps taking an animal naturalized to such conditions and putting it in a warm sun-bed of a city makes it unprepared for the return to reality.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Ulquiorra lifts the tightly woven cowl around his neck over his nose and mouth, something he’d pilfered off a Quincy before they’d all fled the wasteland. At least they had tried to survive, guarding their soft human bodies as best they could. In the end, it was as much of a fool’s errand as had been predicted by everyone but optimism-blind Nelliel.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Her optimism shines like a beacon from the Negar ruins. An ironic name, now. It’s the only place left in Hueco Mundo that doesn’t give in to entropy because of her fastidious homemaking. If she thinks she can escape what has been done and what continues to unfold outside her few walls, Ulquiorra won’t bother with an argument.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">It must be a day or two’s trek from Las Noches, but the voiced wind is a companion whipping through his ears and eventually the warm glow of the light from the windows of the main hall envelops him.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Sung-Sun watches him come up the steep exterior steps from her second story window, her chin resting on her folded arms.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Inside, Harribel sits in a chair at a round table in the centre of the room, somehow both rigid and fully relaxed. A full cup of tea that no longer gives off steam sits in front of her.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Stop staring at her,” Nelliel chides coming down the stairs. “She can still see you.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Ulquiorra tries and fails to meet Harribel’s thousand-yard stare.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“And take off your coat before you get sand everywhere.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“I’m not staying,” Ulquiorra says, but he pulls the cloth away from his face and lets down his hood.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Look at all that,” Nelliel points to the trail of sand he left behind, tracked in his boots and gathered in the folds of his clothing. “Shake off at the door next time at least.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">He follows her into the side room, a compact kitchen and lounge, after she diligently picks up the tea from Harribel’s table.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Oh, I’m not staying,” Nelliel mocks playfully. She pours the water out the open window as though plants will sprout from the cement cracks. “I don’t know why you don’t just come back to the ruins. There are plenty of rooms left. We can fix them any way you’d like.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Are you in need of a hobby?”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Certainly not. I’m busy enough as is.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Yes, Harribel is very rambunctious.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Don’t ruin the mood,” she mutters. “I have hope her soul will return.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“From where?”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“It will heal. There must be something left,” Nelliel whispers. “She wouldn’t be trying to live any way she could if there wasn’t something to salvage."</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Even the simplest of existences knows it has to eat to survive.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“And they don’t give up,” she says as if it’s some sort of revelation</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Ulquiorra crosses his arms. “I once watched one adjuchas hunt down another. The prey was bigger, but once it realized that the other would never let its throat out of its teeth, it lay down and allowed itself to be eaten. That is also a survival instinct.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“So you’re trying to say that I’m… unnaturally extending her life. If it were up to her, Harribel would let herself waste away.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“She doesn’t seem to be able to make even that much of a decision. To die.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“I’m not doing anything wrong.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“You say that for all the things you do, even if half of them are wrong in the end.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“You should go see Grimmjow,” Nelliel says sullenly after a long silence, turning away from him and wiping at nothing on the counter with her thumb. “He’s being quiet.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">And she wants Ulquiorra to disturb that? But she tells him this every time, and so every time he goes to see Grimmjow.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Had it not been for the ferocity of the wind eroding his footsteps as soon as he’s lifted his heel, there would be a well-trodden path scored into the limestone from the ruins to Grimmjow.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Ulquiorra can sense him from leagues away, when he’s so high up. He always finds Grimmjow at the top of a shimmering wall of glass, hundreds of feet across the desert and up away from the surface. It melts up out from the dunes like a cresting wave just as it had been created, the pure heat and pressure of Quincy against arrancar. The only way around is over; rocky ravines mar both ends.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">The elements have sanded the glass wall to be naturally frosted, but chips and cracks reveal a glittering crystallized world with veins of trapped quartz branches.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Finding footholds in the dense air, Ulquiorra climbs to the top of the wall. He still remembers when Grimmjow’s cero had burrowed a walking space, enough space for three or four to walk side by side, the edges of the glass its own railing from the precipice. When Ulquiorra comes over the edge, an arm and blade wrap around his throat, a solid bulk at his back.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Hey,” Grimmjow’s voice in his ear.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Must you?” Ulquiorra pushes away his arm with ease.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“You’re the only action I’ve had all week.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Once he had kept the Quincy in line, but now he is the watcher of dust and hollow amounting to nothing more than rats.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Nelliel sent me,” Ulquiorra says.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Yeah,” Grimmjow sheathes Pantera and sits with his back to the glass, his legs lazily splayed. “As always. I figure you wouldn’t come if she didn’t tell you to.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“I could still not.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“But then what else would’ya do?” He flashes a grin.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Ulquiorra wraps his shawl tighter around himself as a squall of wind comes up. “Just as much as you.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Had a good reap last month. Four big droolin’ adjuchas.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“If you let them live, they might become arrancar.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Nah.” Grimmjow wipes at the frost tipping his eyebrows. “I’m waiting for some specific hollow for that. Until then, I don’t need no companionship.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Your fracción might take centuries to reappear, if they ever do,” Ulquiorra says.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“That’s alright. Just knowin’ that it’s what I gotta do. It’s a feeling, like in my stomach, that it’s them I gotta wait for. Only them. We gotta all be together again.” He scoffs. “Not that you’d know.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“No,” Ulquiorra replies. “I wouldn’t.” But for some reason, the wind is still Szayel’s voice.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>i noticed i reached total 100 kudos and 1000 hits so thanks ~</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">It was one thing to hear things in the wind, but now Ulquiorra sees ghosts in Las Noches.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Or at least he thinks he does.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">He’s not sure what else the streaks of black and orange zipping around corners could be except the remnants of Kurosaki Ichigo. Perhaps Hueco Mundo is undergoing a metamorphosis. Perhaps it is evolving and purging the scarred parts of it.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">But Szayel’s voice chides that fifteen years is not nearly enough time for anything to change in such magnitudes, and the metaphysics of history stored in stone is better left to the anthropologists. Whatever those might be. Ulquiorra had never asked. He knew that as soon as he did suggest Szayel knew more, or that he was at all curious, the inch of chain would be yanked a mile.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">The ghost of Kurosaki Ichigo is smaller than it had been when he was here in the flesh.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Ulquiorra pays more attention to time after the first few sightings. More occur only occasionally, but without fail for two days in a row with much more intense activity after four or five ones of quiet.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">He would expect a ghost of ghosts to replay its previous actions in some way, stuck in time and memory. It does more exploration and trickery than anything else. He can sense it all over Las Noches, weaving in and out of the dimension and bypassing obstacles that way, but eventually it follows him more closely when it realizes it’s being watched.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Not that Ulquiorra strays far from his throne-coffin. More than anything else, he sits and passes the time, basking under the moonlight when it passes over the hole in the roof every day. In this way, he feels stuck. As though nothing had changed from his time with Aizen to now; he did nothing but wait for something external to prod him into action.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">It’s all a haze of time, so much so that he sometimes wonders if anything is happening in the universe at all and if there exists anything outside of his sky-view and desecrated relic.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1"><em>I think, therefore I am, </em>Szayel once said as if it was a profundity.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">
    <em>And the times I don’t think?</em>
  </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">He had looked at Ulquiorra with something pitiful in his eyes.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Ulquiorra thought once he had emerged from the hold Aizen had on him, but time turned him into a bitter golem who watched creation turned to ruin to spite no one but himself. There had been things to do when the Quincy shared this land for some time, but it was an inherently worthless land with nothing to sow. There was no point to much of anything in Hueco Mundo, despite what Nelliel and Grimmjow continued to fascinate themselves with.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">This ghost would soon learn the same, but for now it’s as curious as ever.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">It’s brave enough today to tread the hole in the roof above Ulquiorra and linger for a moment. Ulquiorra’s gaze snaps upwards. The clearest sighting yet — but it’s not Ichigo. Not exactly.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">The ghost grips the rocky concrete edge uncertainly, jumping in his own skin when he meets Ulquiorra’s eyes.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Not a ghost. Just a boy.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Hi,” the boy says, warbled over the wind and his own sudden apprehension. There is only raw instinct to tell him that here resides a dragon.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Ulquiorra looks away, leaning his temple into the corner between the throne’s back rest and side.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Were you sleeping?” The boy calls a bit louder. “Sorry.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Eventually the boy leaves when the silence devours all of his words. His reiatsu, a tangled web of familiar yet new, vanishes from the plane.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">The next time, Ulquiorra meets the boy outside, bound up in his protective shawl and coat. The boy hesitantly joins him on the roof of the tallest tower still standing, but its poisonous black stone sinks further into the sand every month.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“I’m Kazui,” the boy says. “Kurosaki Kazui.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Of course he is. Ulquiorra doesn’t know what the revelation should do to him. It doesn’t particularly matter to him, only makes it that much more obvious how his mind is slipping to think the boy was his father’s ghost rather than a new generation come to torment other worlds in an ouroboros of painful destiny.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">When it’s clear that Ulquiorra doesn’t care, or won’t reply, Kazui asks, “What’s this place called?”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Ulquiorra doesn’t know. Is it still Las Noches, looking as it does?</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“How did you get here if you don’t know what it is?” He says instead.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“I figured out how to open these weird portal things,” Kazui blurts out excitedly. “It’s so fun, like you’re walking through pudding. And on the other side is this place! So much stuff to see.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">It borders on offensive, to think that the ruins of something so magnificent and foreboding is now the playground for a child who doesn’t even grasp what it is he’s doing.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“You’re in Hueco Mundo.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Cool. But it’s all broken, and you’re the only one here.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Yes.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“So,” the boy steps closer and looks up at Ulquiorra with a furrowed brow. “Why are you here? It feels like there’s a lot of hollow far away. Really big ones, some of them.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Ulquiorra’s eyes dart down to him, glowing green and yellow in the slit between his hood and face covering. “What makes you think I’m not a hollow?”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“You sure don’t look like a hollow.” Kazui circles Ulquiorra, making a show of staring at Murciélago, slung horizontally at the small of his back. “Is that a zanpakutō?”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">He doesn’t even know what an arrancar is.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“It used to be.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“What do you mean?”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“I don’t use it,” Ulquiorra says.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Can you still fight with it?”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“You don’t want me to fight.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“But can you?”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Yes.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Cool,” Kazui grins. “Is it harder to use a wakizashi? It’s so short!” The words are awkward in his mouth, like he’s talking about things he’s only ever heard of in passing.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Ulquiorra sighs out through his nose. “It’s not a wakizashi.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“So what is it then?”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“It’s nothing,” Ulquiorra says.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Doesn’t look like nothing!” Before Ulquiorra can even blink, the boy has pulled Murciélago from her sheath and quick-stepped a few metres away. He turns it over to observe the rough break of the blade and her frayed hilt. “Cool,” he whispers again, near reverent.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Ulquiorra is upon him in an instant. He wrests Kazui to the ground by a fistful of hair, forcing his knee into the boy’s chest to keep him winded and pinned. Murciélago skitters across the rooftop.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">There is so much fear in Kazui’s face, but not in his eyes. His eyes blaze hotter than any inferno and there is nothing but challenge to be found in them. His body might be trembling beneath Ulquiorra’s grip but his soul is ready for the fight. The death drive of his father lives on.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“I would have expected your mother to teach you not to take what isn’t yours,” Ulquiorra spits.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Kazui’s expression hardens. “Do you know my mom?”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1"><em>I was the one who taught your mother to fear what might be waiting behind the door in dark rooms, </em>Ulquiorra thinks, but he finds there is little pride left in the sulking ashes of the past.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">If vengeance was his poison, he could grab Kazui by the throat and present him to his mother, in the grasp of a demon with only an inch of skin between the boy’s life and a claw, if only to say, <em>look, here I am still, and you are never safe. </em>But for what purpose? No one had told him to do that.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Ulquiorra stands up and collects Murciélago. “Don’t come back here."</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Ulquiorra is in his quartz tree.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">This place is familiar and welcoming. It says nothing, and exudes nothing, and in this nothingness he doesn’t think of anything and wants for nothing.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">That’s all he’s wanted, isn’t it? In some roundabout way, to want to not want anything. He might live day by day as though he does not, but there is something deep pulsing with need that he cannot completely turn away from.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">But he doesn’t think about that here.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">He might be staked to its branches, but his flesh has closed firmly around every puncture and his skin even begins to erode into the crystalline tree, the edges of him fuzzy and more of a suggestion than a defined existence.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">The universe sways around him, churning as it does, never once reaching him in this place set aside.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">But then there is a surge of pain throughout his whole body, and he writhes on the branches as they morph into thousands of blades, huge broadswords and tiny knives slicing him and slicing pieces out of his thighs and back.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">There is such a great noise in his ears, the world rushing back at him.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">The centre of the quartz-sword tree shatters and he falls into the darkness below until he slams into Aizen’s abandoned throne. He is covered in blood, more red than white in any one area, so slippery with it that he would otherwise slip down off the throne, were it not for one blade left keeping him in place, pierced through his hollow hole and the stone backrest.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Ulquiorra grabs the twisted guard of the quartz sword, something meant to be wielded by a giant, but he cannot pull it out. His blood stains his skin like his insides have turned to mashed pomegranate flesh, yet none of it comes off on anything else. It’s all his to own.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">His hands fall away from the sword uselessly, and he collapses back with a pitiful, defeated whimper. If only he had more strength to move it. If only he was truly of an extraordinary ilk.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">All Ulquiorra ever had in the end, he decides, was the adrenaline of delusion.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">When he takes a breath in, the feeling of it all pins and needles from the shards of quartz stuck in his lungs, he opens his eyes and sees nothing but gold, and it is the gold of Szayel’s eyes.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Szayel is pulling him up the blade, up to the hilt, and he thinks <em>no, no, no,</em> because he won’t make it over. His slippery hands find a grip on Szayel’s shoulders and he is forced through the quartz, shattering and splintering it, and it burns as real suns might, but when he is free then he is free.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Ulquiorra awakens to a whisper on the wind, <em>“my darkest star…”</em></span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">The dreams that do make it to the surface are often and quickly lost in that murky, sloshing puddle of reality. Some he cannot lose, some bubble up to the surface to his mind in this world, something that is distinct in its centre of rationality and logic and does not flower with quartz swords.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">But sometimes it feels as though the clearest truths are found within his dreams.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">The palms of Ulquiorra’s hands still tingle, like he’d really been touching Szayel again, even though he was impossibly far, imprisoned in Seireitei. There was always something about his being that had been electric, every sulk and triumph of his charged with a bubbling, schizophrenic energy.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Once as Szayel slept through his post-eureka crash, Ulquiorra had watched him and the delicate wisps of his pale eyelashes, trying to find something in the way his skin stretched over his bones. He had a thought that it was all just millions of meaningless nothings covering a skeleton that would one day be buried beneath the sand, the gaping maw of a great beast cemented in limestone or the tail fin of something that swam in the dried ocean. There was only an animal of impulse there, next to him, and within himself. There was nothing comforting about the fact.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Ulquiorra had rested a hand on the side of Szayel’s face, warm and meticulously smooth, and kissed Szayel awake who smiled against Ulquiorra’s lips because it was not something he did. At least not before.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">And the impulse to smile, he’d thought, what is that? Was it anything like the impulse to kiss?</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Ulquiorra knows Kazui is back, and following him as he treks back to his tower, but he doesn’t address the boy who tries to buffet the sandstorms by pulling his green hood tightly over his head.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Stubbornness.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Ulquiorra thinks he’s stubborn himself in some ways, but that comes from a part of his mind that is quickly silenced when he enters his old abode, everything covered in thick dust. The four corners of his quaint, single room are miniatures of Hueco Mundo’s dunes. When he steps out onto the balcony, the concrete balustrade withers and falls away.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">There is nothing inside for Kazui to snoop, so he comes up beside Ulquiorra.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“I asked my mom about this place,” he starts shyly. “She told me to never come here again.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“It made you want to come back more,” Ulquiorra says.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Yeah,” the boy admits.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">He might know something about humans after all. The worst parts of them. What was he, in the end? An abyss of all the worst things in the universe.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“You’re all alone here,” Kazui says. “I dunno why. I guess I’m just curious.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Why? Because everyone who had been around Ulquiorra is gone.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">But that’s not true.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Nelliel and Grimmjow are out in the wasteland. They’re just as alone as he is, but there’s no real reason for it, is there? They all know where the other is, and there’s nothing to stop Ulquiorra from returning to Nelliel’s ruins or deciding to take up hollow hunting with Grimmjow. It’s something pathologic that separates them all from each other, they all push it away. Or perhaps they’re all reaching and can never seem to grasp what it is they want.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Ulquiorra desires so much that the weight of it all has collapsed into a singularity, a nothingness.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Had it ever been as simple as having others around him — things that happened around him, to him, rather than involving him? Had Nelliel, Grimmjow, Szayel, the rest, all done something to be considered a part of Ulquiorra?</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">He thought he was a created, formed and fired figure. It could be that he is more like soft clay and the reason that each fingerprint is unique is to leave their signature in his body.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">What had they done to him?</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">When he looks down at this boy, he wonders yet, what are they going to do to him?</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">And, no, what will <em>he </em>do to them?</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">He asks Kazui, “Have you been to Seireitei?”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Of course I have!"</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“I know someone there."</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“What are you waitin’ for, Cifer?”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">Usually Grimmjow’s question would come in the heat of a fight, goading Ulquiorra on to stop dodging and hit him like he means it. Ulquiorra means everything he does, of course. He is both tightly wound, on the very teetering edge of a thread, and lazy in his convictions.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">But now the question breaks a silent reverie on the top of the wall, and Grimmjow is in a dour mood. He’d been gone for some time, and returned empty-handed, bloodless.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">Is there something that Ulquiorra should be waiting for? The world itself to sink into an ocean of fire and be consumed in its entirety, so that all the weeping souls might be finally put to rest, perhaps. He suspects it might be many millennia more. That is an empty kind of waiting, for the inevitable but timeless.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“Don’t piss me off any more than I already am,” Grimmjow snarls. He’s expecting an answer. Ulquiorra notes his restraint, something he must have learned between then and now; Ulquiorra would have expected to been grabbed by the collar and shaken to speech by brute force.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“I’m not waiting,” Ulquiorra says.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“We’re all waitin’ for something. Nel’s waiting for Harribel to fix herself, I guess. The next big thing to happen so she can be a hero. And I’m…”Grimmjow sighs, like it pains him. “Y’know. My friends.”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“I don’t have anything to wait for.”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“Szayel,” Grimmjow suggests.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">Ulquiorra doesn’t want to reply to that.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“How’d it happen, anyways? You n’ Szayel.”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“It just happened. He’d fuck anything that moves.”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“Yeah,” Grimmjow rests his head against a raised swoop of the quartz wall. “But not like you move much, huh.”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“Blinking might be enough.”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">Grimmjow laughs, his grin like the slice of a blade, his surliness peeling away.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">Szayel liked marble, Ulquiorra remembers. <em>My little Bernini, </em>he’d say when he was in an admiring mood, <em>the sculptor who could make pure white stone like flesh and cloth.</em></span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“If even one of your fracción returns,” Ulquiorra asks, “What do you expect will happen?”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">Grimmjow’s face falls into something that there is probably no name for. His eyes flit across the horizon as though he is observing the very horizon bleeding into the shapes of his friends and he is lit up from within, but his forehead and the lines around his nose are hard.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“I ain’t fantasizing,” he grumbles. “My head ain’t in the clouds thinking ‘bout how we’re all going to fuckin’ frolic around together. But we’re gonna hunt and we’re gonna live good, how we’re meant to. Doing whatever, whenever.”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">Grimmjow already does that, to an extent. But not to its fullest. There is an unspeakable chain tethering him to not straying far from his lookout. Ulquiorra thinks it’s the same thing that keeps him in his crypt of a throne room — would he do any different than he does now? Rot there, think, go dust-blind? No, but there is an underlying malaise about it. That if something was different, in some way, it would be less of a thing he did merely to pass the time.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">Why he wants anything more or different is yet to be discovered.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“It would feel right,” Grimmjow concludes. “I dunno how to explain it to you. You don’t get that kind of shit. It just feels right.”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">The wind takes those words some distance before Ulquiorra asks, “Would it be better if I did get it?”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“What’re y’talking about?”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">His eyes flicker over to Grimmjow, away from the veins of quartz creeping up and down the dunes, for leagues upon leagues of scarred misery. “It would all be different. If I understood anything about —”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“Anything about anything,” Grimmjow snorts. “How do you know y’don’t?”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">Ulquiorra’s eyebrows furrow. “I don’t.”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“You ever think you’re making assumptions ‘bout what goes on in other people? Maybe you do get it. But you ain’t me, or anyone else. I don’t know what’s in your fuckin’ head, and I don’t wanna.”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">Animal impulses, Ulquiorra thinks.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“Hey,” Grimmjow grunts. “Wanna fight?”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">Ulquiorra nods.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">All of it animal impulses.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
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